irakli's blog

A popular joke of the 21st century has been that the Web is "ruled" by teenagers. That saying may be a joke, but the truth is: we live in an era in which a self-organized group of college students, without any funding can take on global organizations like HSBC.

How come?

Because large organizations are too damned SLOW! Web is extremely fast-paced and the large bureaucratic beasts are often just way too late to the party.

To give couple examples:

1) In most organizations people who can quickly react to an emerging topic, on the Web, concerning the organization, are not allowed to. The messages "have to go through proper channels" and channels take time.

Solution: either remove the channels or make sure they do not take so much time. Can you achieve 10-minute turnaround? If not - relax the preemptive oversight. Educate your employes of what's acceptable and what is not. Let them take initiatives of engaging in the conversations on the Web, let them make mistakes (they will make some), make sure they learn from those.

2) Use agile technologies. Forget about "enterprise" this and that. Forget about IBM. Use what is already available: Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, GoogleMaps etc. For the part you need to build, use Drupal, WordPress, DJango, RubyOnRails. Use technologies that can give you results QUICKLY.

I've been a Java architect long enough and I know enterprise Java technologies well-enough to allow myself say this: most organizations that build websites in Java (or any other heavy-weight technology like that) are just wasting their time. Java is great and there are many incredible things you can build with it if you are an Internet backbone company like Verisign, but Java is not for your blogging needs or even for your website of average complexity.

Be responsive, be quick, be agile. Worn-out phrase or not, I will repeat this: please, please, do not be afraid to make mistakes.

Software engineering has introduced the paradigm of the separation of the View (visual representation) from the Model (business logic) long time ago. In the realm of the Web, this principle was re-emphasized. In the late '90s and early 2000s the separation was used to accommodate for differences between physical mediums that a web-page could be viewed on: from the lame WAP browsers to incompatible HTML ones of all kinds. Or at least, this is how it was commonly explained. I, for one, have rarely seen any actual web-application that would cleanly and transparently render to WAP and HTML from the same engine. Also, the WAP mess disappeared long before most developers would start to feel its pains. But that's a different story.

These days tiny gadgets (think: iPhone or Blackberry if you are "uncool") have better, more compliant browsers than some desktop systems (would that be Windows?). Is the need for MVC - the separation of Model and View gone?

On the contrary. The peak of the so-called Web 2.0 is characterized by the flood of widgets of all kinds. Widgets for iGoogle, "applications" for Facebook and even - web-enabled widgets for Desktop systems like OS-X Dashboard. Large companies of the kind of New York Times produce widgets for all of these mediums. Obviously, something like that can be a huge expenditure if you are writing each widget from scratch each time and do not re-use anything but the database.

Therefore, the Web Question of 2009 becomes: can your website's source code output a widget instead of a full-fledged website with very little code change?

Think about it.

I woke up feeling a little prophet-ish this morning. I would bet you money, but it is illegal, so I am just going to say: I know what the next big service thing from Google should will be! Ready? It's a free SMS gateway that allows sending SMS messages through an open API.

Now think about it. Text-messaging ("SMSing") has been hot for a while now. Marketing companies and individuals are already using it big time. Text-messaging is expensive, though. Many little startups, with little, but interesting pilot sites just can not afford it. How is the industry going to innovate, if the innovators can not afford the tools?

There's a lot of data transmitted over text-messages and it could be even more interesting than the data you find in emails. Text-messages typically have less spam. If Google is willing to provide huge mailboxes for free, just for a chance to index e-mail text - they should be dying to get their hands on text-messages. If anything, Google is late to do it.

You say "privacy"? I say - yeah, like Google cares.

So, here it is - you should see something like it in the next 6 months. I give it a year tops.

Yet another reason for me not to be a fan of Joomla:

How can a designer not know a trademarked logo of a global organization like World Bank and manage to "steal" it for use in its own, petty "connect" banner?

Human stupidity is indeed infinite, Albert.

Cooliris is one of these new gadgets that sound cool in somebody's blog review, but do not live up to an expectation when actually used. Let alone that it is not nearly as useful as it claims to be, Cooliris has been reported to significantly slow down Safari on Macs. Specifically - when viewing FLASH videos like on YouTube. These fellas must have done something terribly wrong.

In any case, the real sad part is - they don't have any human way of uninstalling it. So here is a quick tutorial of how to remove this weed from your computer and let your Safari breath again:

• Close Safari
• Trash the Cooliris Previews folder found in $LIBRARY/InputManagers/)
• Trash the cooliris' .plugin file found in $LIBRARY/Internet Plugins

Depending on whether you installed Cooliris for just your user or system-wide, substitute $LIBRARY with /Users//Library or /System/Library.

Hope this works for you, too.

If you work in a noisy office (or home) environment and can't concentrate, this is a must-have Mac app: http://www.blackholemedia.com/noise/

Quick Note: the Administration Menu module in Drupal seems to have some weird bug in ver. 5.2.5 which causes menu items listing to disappear on admin/build/menu configuration page.

Solution: disable and remove Administration Menu module, download 5.2.6 or later version, install that one. If the problem persists run "menu_rebuild();" from hook_init() of any module or even from page.tpl.php. Problem should be gone.

Enjoy.

Google released to open-source its "language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible way of serializing structured data for use in communications protocols, data storage, and more": Protocol Buffers.

Google claims it's like XML, but better mostly because: "[Protocol Buffers] are 3 to 10 times smaller, and 20 to 100 times faster".

My feelings about this news are mixed. Like I was just telling Doug you can't argue with Google when it comes to matters of performance and speed, BUT you can feel disgusted at the fact that a giant, like Google, uses its muscle to diminish and harm the crucial standard like XML. XML took so long to get adopted, made so much possible and is still so fragile, that you can't take this matter lightly.

OK, maybe the PB thing is faster and smaller and blah, blah, blah and maybe it's not as cumbersome as CORBA was, so it's not total evil, BUT (I repeat - BUT) let's be honest here - not everybody is Google and I can bet 90% of systems just do not care about the same things Google does. So, XML is fine for most applications.

However, now that Google is pushing one more of its bloated technologies (want another example? Think GWT) - a lot of people will adopt it just because it's a Google thing. And it may harm XML, and it may harm industry.

So, you see - as much as we all love open-source, sometimes when open-source gets intermixed with big, corporate politics - things can go south.

And last but not least, if you want more object-oriented, smaller, faster exchange format, there is JSON! JSON is well adopted and support, so why, God, why do mere mortals like ourselves need Protocol Buffers?

Geeks among us often wonder what a website is built with. Is it a Java/J2EE home-cooked mess? Is it a .Net nightmare? Or is it a common CMS installation styled to the extent of not being recognizable (i.e. not being ugly, anymore :) )?

Most 5-minute drupal installations will respond to requests like http://example.com/user/ and http://example.com/admin/ and you will see familiar Drupal interface: either the ugly tabs, or the Garland itself.

More paranoid (or careful?) admins may have the default URIs disguised for public eyes. If we are doing analysis using an automated tool (somebody?) it's better to have an alternative method since other CMS's may respond to the same URIs and automated tools don't have eyes to see the ugly tabs.

What may help in a complex analysis of a site is looking at its HTML source. If in the header you see URIs like "/misc/drupal.js" you know this site is running Drupal! If the website admin had enabled javascript aggregation, though, you won't see anything like that and will have to hunt for "/sites/default/files/js" pattern.

Also, please note that Drupal does not load drupal.js if no other javascript is requested from code, so you may not see any of those on the home page. It's the best to look at the "Add Comment" pages, since those usually have some Javascript.

Happy hunting! :)

Firefox 3.0 web-browser has been released! The new browser has much slicker (imho) user-interface, feels faster/lighter and is just plain awesome!

For FireBug users (i.e. any web-developer and designer?) out there: you need to manually download a new major release version, 1.2.0b4. Automated update of 1.05 won't work.

Don't know about Windows machines, but on Macs you can rename the existing Firefox to Firefox2 under Applications, before installing Firefox3 and that way you can keep running both in parallel (though not at the same time). Once you upgrade the plug-ins, you can not use them in the Firefox 2, anymore and you will start getting warnings. It's still useful for testing rendering of websites and making sure your HTML/CSS works in Firefox 2, though.